Thirty miles later, the highway arrives here in the bayou town of Slidell -- a busy suburb of strip malls and subdivisions that bills itself as ``Louisiana's Best-Kept Secret.'' It is also home to Ronnie Scelson, one of the biggest spammers in America.

Lunchtime finds the 29-year-old Scelson sitting cross-legged on the floor of his storefront TV repair shop while he munches on a takeout meal of boiled crawfish and spiced shrimp.

Clean-shaven and slightly pudgy, he's dressed in black jeans and a black short-sleeved jersey. Around his neck, he wears a gold necklace with a pendant of Scooby-Doo, his favorite cartoon character.

Scelson, a night owl by nature, arrived at the cinder-block shop only about an hour earlier. In the backroom, he nods toward two floor-to-ceiling racks of computer equipment -- part of a system he uses to blast out e-mail advertising for Rolex watches, herbal supplements, insurance policies and more.

``With e-mail, I can guarantee you 80 million people,'' says Scelson, a self-taught computer repairman turned professional bulk e-mailer. ``I can touch more people in a day's time than the Super Bowl can.''

Ronnie Scelson -- and scores of spammers like him -- are the people who stuff the nation's computer in-boxes with junk e-mail.

Once merely an annoyance, junk e-mail is quickly reaching epidemic proportions in cyberspace. Billions of such messages regularly crisscross the Internet, pitching everything from herbal remedies to X-rated websites.

The growing flood of e-mail advertising has crashed Internet servers, clogged connections and cost business untold hours of wasted employee time. It has also forced millions of bleary-eyed Internet users to undertake the seemingly endless chore of clearing the electronic clutter from their in-box.

Attempts to stop the surge have met with little success. Meanwhile, with each new message, spam comes closer to threatening e-mail's future as an effective conduit for personal and business communication.

Just Another Vehicle

Legions of e-mail users may regard spam as the scourge of the Internet, but Scelson is unapologetic about sending it. To him, Internet e-mail is just another vehicle for advertising -- like billboards, newspapers and the sides of buses.

``There's advertising everywhere you look. I don't care if you open a book or a magazine or walk down the street, it's everywhere,'' he says.

At one point last year, Scelson claims, he was sending more bulk e-mail than anyone in America: tens of millions of messages a day to his carefully nurtured list of working e-mail addresses.

More recently, he's been knocked off-line by anti-spam activists who succeeded in getting his Internet connections shut down -- at least temporarily. But Opt-In Marketing Services, the bulk e-mail company Scelson founded, is fighting back in federal court with a $1 million lawsuit that could have far-reaching consequences for e-mail advertising.

Scelson won't say precisely how much money he's made from bulk e-mailing, but he claims it's lucrative. Enough to support a five-bedroom house in Slidell, complete with a game room, a home office and an in-ground pool. Enough, too, for his canary-yellow 2001 Corvette.

Not bad for a guy who says he only made it through the eighth grade and worked his way out of a trailer park by teaching himself about computers.

Hiding Their Identity

Most spammers go to great lengths to hide their identity and camouflage their activities. They often forge the return address on their e-mails. Some even bounce their e-mails off computers in Asia and Europe to disguise the point of origin.

Though also secretive about some of his dealings, Scelson is one of the few spammers willing to talk publicly about his bulk e-mail service, which starts, he says, at $1,000 a day.

``If I don't make a grand off of you, I won't touch you again. That's my bare minimum. If I can't get that, I'm not interested,'' he says. ``And that's cheap. That's as low as it gets.''

So how does it work? Scelson offers this example of a mailing campaign for a client selling travel packages:

Opt-In Marketing sends out 80 million e-mails offering vacation packages. For each person who clicks on the e-mail to visit the travel company's website, the company earns $1 -- a fee roughly in line with industry norms.

More than 99.9 percent of the recipients may ignore that come-on. But if the e-mails go out by the millions, only a small fraction need respond to make the job pay off big.

``When I send that much mail out, I'll generate 30,000 to 40,000 travel leads in a week without a bit of problem,'' Scelson says.

What's more, he says, Opt-In typically gets a percentage of the take from people who actually sign up for a trip, so the company stands to earn thousands more if the package proves popular.